Accountant Robin Danvers travels to Morocco with her artist husband Paul for a much-needed long vacation. There has been some tension in their relationship, with their various unsuccessful attempts to conceive and Paul’s recklessness with money, and Robin hopes that a trip to Morocco will help smooth out their relationship. Unfortunately, things don’t go quite as planned. Robin catches Paul out in a horrible lie, and when he disappears, she becomes the prime suspect in the police inquiry.

The Blue Hour started off slow, and only really picked up steam for me in the final third or so. I sympathized with Robin’s marital troubles and her unmet desire for a child, but when Paul disappears, I didn’t quite understand why she was so concerned over his welfare that she’d go so far out of her way to track him down. She’s found him out in a pretty major lie, and her investigation keeps uncovering almost an entire secret life, with a whole new set of dangers that threaten to drag her down as well.

Paul’s disappearance seems to be of his own volition, and he seems to have no interest in reconnecting with her — at one point, she sees him in the street, only to have him disappear in the crowd. Then she finds out he may be connected with a particularly shady man, the type who can be either a good friend or a dangerous foe, yet instead of cutting her marital losses and leaving for the safety of home, Robin persists in digging deeper into her husband’s past and in continuing to try to track him down. I understand that this search forms the entire impetus for the story, but for a large chunk of the book, I wondered why she was willing to risk so much just to find him.

Then a rather random, horrible incident occurs, and it completely shifts the rest of the story. On one hand, I’m somewhat bothered by this twist, as it seemed so unnecessary. On the other hand, the story did pick up afterwards — suddenly the threat Robin faces actually feels real, and I felt much more invested in her race for survival than in her earlier race to find her husband.

Kennedy does a good job in describing places.  You can almost feel the heat and the crush of bodies as Robin moves around Morocco, and you can almost see the vast, parched, shimmering expanse of the Sahara desert.

It took me a while to get into The Blue Hour, the whole love story angle really still doesn’t ring true for me, and I still wish the momentum of the final third could have been sustained throughout. But I thought the descriptions were really strong, and I like how the book ended.

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Thanks to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.